UK’s leading environmental services company

This company provides the full service of Asbestos removal and demolition.

Project Scope

Bugfixing

Backend development

Frontend development

Data Migration

Refactoring and documentation

Building APIs for service integration

1

Goal

This company has been providing exceptional quality asbestos removal solutions in the UK since 1976. One of the key aspects that help make them ‘best in class’ is their collective experience across a wide range of projects, and their commitment to quality standards that have contributed to raising the level of performance across the industry as a whole. This company has a Ruby on Rails web application as a Backend to an Android/Cordova/Backbone.js mobile application serving supervisors and administrators to report field activities. Administrators review the data submitted by project supervisors. We were initially asked to help with towards the following goals:

Improve the application's data reporting flexibility by allowing dynamic data input (adding and removing an indefinite number of supervised elements).

Enhance the visual appearance and usability of generated PDF reports.

Implement an additional supervision stage into the application's flow.

2

Process

Codescrum initially found many problems setting up the web and mobile applications to work on them, so as a first task we turned to document the setup process to make it reproducible enough to setup a simple delivery pipeline. Once this was done, we could then continue implementing the dynamic data input on the Android app, with the corresponding changes in the Ruby on Rails app and database structure changes. This required migrating some of the existing data to a more flexible data model on both apps, while supporting existing field project data.

3

Impact

As a result of our work, pretty much the entirety of the application now allows information to be dynamically inputted. This gives the application the flexibility to model larger projects.

After the visual improvements, the PDF reporting tool can now be directly used as a final resource for administrators and customers reviews, saving time and money.

We improved the application's data synchronization performance up to 100X, once the correct data structure was adjusted and duplicate data was removed from the transmission.

While maintaining the original client's priorities, we also spotted and exposed several other problems which were then properly resolved including inconsistent searching behaviours, photo management inconsistencies, and minor security issues.